The Most Unsordid Act in History ?

by James Lachlan MacLeod

Mr. MacLeod is an Associate Professor of History, University of Evansville, Indiana.

Iraq's chief civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer said it, in evidence before
the senate appropriations committee on Sept 22, 2003. Charles Krause, distinguished
foreign correspondent of the "NewsHour," said it in a special report
about the Marshall Plan airing on PBS in 1997. John W. Snyder, secretary of the
treasury in the Truman Administration, said it in 1969. Former British Prime Minister
John Major said it in 2002. It has been said countless times in essays, articles,
and speeches, and has appeared in the Harvard Magazine (2000), the Washington
Post (2003), the Guardian editorial page (2003), the U.S. Department
of Defense's DefenseLINK (1997) and on various U.S. Embassy official websites.
Even the president of the United States said it in 1997, in his commencement address
at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point. And on every single occasion, the person
saying it was wrong.

It was said most recently by Paul Krugman in his widely syndicated New York
Times column on September 30, which provoked a refutation in, among other
places, Donald Luskin's poorandstupid.com
website. Krugman issued a correction in the New York Times on October
3. What Krugman and all of the others said was that Winston Churchill described
the Marshall Plan as the "most unsordid act in history." Clearly Churchill
thought highly of the Marshall Plan, and spoke warmly of it -- he said: "General
Marshall's decision was on the highest level of statesmanship" -- but there
is no evidence that he ever described it as "unsordid." This famous
quote, when used in reference to the Marshall Plan, is simply wrong.

Churchill did, of course, use the phrase, but he did so with reference to Lend-Lease,
the program that signaled large-scale public American involvement in the Second
World War and without which, it can be argued, the blitzed and beleaguered British
would not have been able to continue fighting. He used the phrase (or versions
of it) most famously twice; first on November 10 1941 in a speech at the Mansion
House in London in which he also said somewhat prophetically that "should
the United States become involved in war with Japan the British declaration
will follow within the hour." On that occasion Churchill said:

Then came the majestic policy of the President and Congress of the United
States in passing the Lease-Lend Bill, under which, in two successive enactments,
about £3,000,000,000 was dedicated to the cause of world freedom, without
-- mark this, because it is unique -- without the setting up of any account
in money. Never again let us hear the taunt that money is the ruling power
in the hearts and thoughts of the American democracy. The Lease-Lend Bill
must be regarded without question as the most unsordid act in the whole of
recorded history.

Five years later, in his famous eulogy for Roosevelt delivered in the House
of Commons, he said, "At about that same time he devised the extraordinary
measure of assistance called Lend-Lease, which will stand forth as the most
unselfish and unsordid financial act of any country in all history." Churchill
himself later cited it in a slightly different form - "the most unsordid
act in the history of any nation" - in his Nobel Prize winning history
of the Second World War. The well-crafted phrase caught on, despite its slightly
schizophrenic nature -- was it the most unsordid act, period, or the most unsordid
financial act? -- and by 1969 it was sufficiently synonymous with Lend-Lease
for it to be the principal part of the title of Warren F Kimball's classic and
much-cited book on that subject.

And yet already confusion was creeping in. In 1969 -- the same year as Kimball's
book -- Truman's treasury secretary, John Wesley Snyder, a man who presumably
had a high level of knowledge of Lend-Lease and who was present when the Marshall
Plan was signed into law, would put the quote in the wrong context in an oral
history interview for the Truman Library, an interview that was subsequently
edited by Snyder himself. Over the next four decades, the mistake would be repeated
again and again by academics, journalists, pundits, politicians and even, as
we have seen, by the 42nd President of the United States, William Jefferson
Clinton, and by the Bush Administration's top man in Baghdad, Ambassador Paul
Bremer. And as all of these figures who spoke or wrote the words take the heat
for their mistake, so too must an unseen battalion of researchers, copy-editors,
fact-checkers and speech-writers, all of whom have allowed this error to remain
in the public domain for at least 40 years despite the sometimes vast resources
at their disposal.

Who is to blame? The homepage of the Churchill Centre at Winstonchurchill.org
pins the blame on the 1960 book Sketches from Life by Dean Acheson, but since
this site incorrectly traces the original phrase to Churchill's 1945 Commons
speech rather than his 1941 Mansion House speech, it is clear that even here
there is doubt and confusion. Acheson may or may not be the first person to
make the mistake in print, but there is no way to tell if he had heard it from
another source. Acheson, however, was clearly not the last person to make the
mistake and since the debate is currently raging in the blogsphere - albeit
more from a desire for partisan political capital than from a touching concern
for absolute historical accuracy - this seems like a good time to consider the
lessons of the quote that never was.

All of us who are interested in history, whether professional historians or
not, need to develop a healthy level of skepticism when we read history. As
James Loewen might say, we need to be alert to the lies our teachers told us,
even when they were quite certain that they were telling us the truth, perhaps
especially so when they were certain. We also need to be relentless in our pursuit
of accuracy when we are writing history. We need to return to the great defining
principal of Renaissance humanism as practiced by scholars like Erasmus and
always strive to return ad fontes, back to the sources.

Tiresome though it is, we need to check and double check our sources, especially
for phrases and ideas that we have used numerous times, and which have taken
on a kind of sheen of veracity whether deserved or not. Everybody knows that
Churchill said that the Marshall Plan was the "most unsordid act in history,"
right? Just open up another window and do a Google Search and see what you get
-- hundreds and hundreds of hits for Churchill saying that about the Marshall
Plan. Hundreds and hundreds of hits for people getting it wrong. Some of these
hits are on Internet essay mills -- the bane of many a professor's life -- but
many of them are from articles and essays in journals and newspapers of the
highest quality. Let this much repeated mistake inspire us all to go back to
our notes, check the page numbers, and reread the original. With hard work,
and great care, and perhaps a little luck, we will not join the long list of
those who have been made to look foolish by History.

More Comments:

jim smith -
6/6/2004

May I suggest that there is more to the misattribution of the 'unsordid act' quote than meets the eye? Look again at the first, 1941, use. When, let us remember, America was not yet at war.

> about £3,000,000,000 was dedicated to the cause of world freedom, without -- mark this, because it is unique -- without the setting up of any account in money.

Churchill is saying that the money is going to world freedom (not Britain) with the obvious implication, since there has been no firming up of how or whether it will be repaid, that it is not Britain's debt as such.

What actually happened was Truman's instant and unexpected cessation of Lend-Lease after the Bomb ended the war, and some very hard bargaining to a secure a loan, within which Lend-Lease commitments were wrapped up with smoke and mirrors (and which Britain is scheduled to finish paying back in 2006). Looking back, the unsordidness seems less striking and there is an internal logic to Americans transferring the phrase to Marshall Aid, even though Churchill never did.

Perhaps the 'most unsordid financial act' should be regarded somewhat in the light of the mendicant's 'You have a kind face lady'. It wasn't that unsordid and you ain't that pretty!

Churchill was hoping it would prove to be unsordid. In the event, it turned out to be the usual run-of-the-mill mix of principle and pragmatism that attends most political manoeuvres.

Oscar Chamberlain -
10/13/2003

Obviously, this article was the last straw for Mr. Clarke, and like many last straws, it was an apparently illogical choice. It's a mistake that I've made, and for that I have sympathy.

By why the animosity toward Evansville? I lived across the Ohio in Henderson for a couple of years, and I found Evansville a pleasant place, and I gained great respect for the University there. Surely Mr. Clarke is not suggesting that pearls of wisdom can only be found in the great cities, or at universities the size of most county seats?

Dave Livingston -
10/13/2003

We should have waited until the danger was imminent to act to preserve our nation from those who hate and would destroy us? That is a weird way of looking at danger. Evidently, Elia, you've never carried a rifle on the field of battle. I have. Coming upon Communist troopsin base camp in the jungles of Viet-Nam U.S troops shouldn't haver opened fire? Should have awaited their attack. Come on and awaken to the real world. Have you forgotten 9/11 already? Or wasn't that serious enough of an event for our government to take decisive action to ensure to the best of its ability it wouldn't happen again?

Have our universities become a suburb of coo-coo land, divorced from reality. Evidently so. As Dennis Prager said in "JWR" it would do academics a world of good to hold a job in the real world after having spent all their lives, Kindergaten through grad school,in school amongst children, before re-entering that world of children.

Richard Langworth -
10/12/2003

Professor MacLeod is quite right to correct us for suggesting that Churchill's first reference to "the most unsordid act" with regard to the World War II Lend-Lease Act came was in 1945 rather than 1941, and we will correct this on our website. But Prof. Macleod is wrong to state that our website "pins the blame" on Dean Acheson's 1960 book, "Sketches from Life." We simply reported that New York Times editorial writer Karl Meyer it had, after research, ascribed the original error to Acheson. You can look it up:
http://www.winstonchurchill.org/fh96date.htm#UNSORDIDRichard M. Langworth Editor
FINEST HOUR, The Churchill Centre, Washington.

John Earl Haynes -
10/10/2003

I've seen in the literature and accepted without questioning that Churchill's "most unsordid act in history" referred to the Marshall Plan for years. My thanks to Professor MacLeod and to HNN for running his item correcting this matter.

John Earl Haynes

Herodotus -
10/10/2003

You would do well to read Professor Kimball's post, below.

Warren F. Kimball -
10/7/2003

Your summary of the canard that Winston Churchill called the Marshall Plan "The Most Unsordid Act" is spot-on. (And thanks for the nice words about my book.) Here's the letter I sent to The New York Times on that:

To the Editor:

I feel a bit like a broken record, since I have had to make this correction on other occasions. Paul Krugman attributed to Winston Churchill the wonderful label of “the most unsordid act” for the Marshall Plan (NYT, 30 Sept. 2003). However sordid or unsordid the Marshall Plan may have been, I know of not a single shred of evidence that Churchill so referred to the Marshall Plan. He reserved that appellation for the Lend-Lease Act of 1941, the program that provided aid to those nations fighting Nazi Germany and later Imperial Japan.

It would be nice if Mr. Krugman put that canard to rest in his column. I’d like to avoid having to write this letter again.

Sincerely yours,

Warren F. Kimball

[author of The Most Unsordid Act: Lend-Lease, 1941 (1968) and editor of Churchill & Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence (1984).]

I might add (for HNN) that the most long-lasting significance of this silly teapot-tempest, is to give Winston Churchill credit for inventing a word -- "unsordid" -- one that is now in the OED!

Peter K. Clarke -
10/6/2003

After dozens of Likudnik propaganda articles masquerading as "history", articles comparing Bush's Iraq fiasco to Lincoln's plans for reconstruction, to the Marshall Plan, and to who know knows what (Columbus's discoveries perhaps ?), and endless of litanies sensationalistically misheadlined pieces, we are now supposed to get all righteously hot and bothered about one possibly misplaced adjective of Churchill ? I for one am not going to bother to hunt for a magnifying glass to find Evansville, Indiana on the map.

Elia Markell -
10/6/2003

Interesting. Hope we won't need to wait 50 years for people to discover the falsity of the, already, hundreds and hundreds hits you can get for Bush saying the iraqi threat was imminent (when in fact he stressed over and over it was NOT imminent, but that action was justified anyway). No need to go back to Churchill to dissect urban legends. Our media manufacture them for us at light speed now.